According to many research reports, the average salesperson spends less than half of their day actually selling. In fact, according to a recent Hubspot post, sales reps should spent 39% of their days selling in order to obtain their quota requirements, but instead they are pulled in many different directions: searching for and gathering information, sending and responding to emails, and internal and external meetings. That leaves very little time to actually do their job (sell) and to hit their quota requirements.
Sales Rep Time Utilization (via Hubspot)
But as a marketer or a sales manager, your sales reps are in a prime position as they interact with customers and prospective customers daily. It’s easy to divert their attention to promoting a webinar, driving attendance to an event, sharing the latest content… or the hundred other initiatives your marketing team is working hard to promote. It’s easy to turn to the sales reps as a vehicle for promotion since they have a personal relationship with those important contacts.
So how do you both win? How do you, as a marketer or sales manager, ensure your reps have the tools and content to move relationships forward while also making sure they have enough time to do so?
Utilize 1:1 Email Communications
The average employee of an organization sends 10,000 emails annually. And that’s the average! If a sales rep spends 28% of their day reading and responding to emails, then it’s likely they send much more volume than that. In fact, according to Radicati Group’s Email Report, 112 BILLION business emails are sent daily. No, that doesn’t include emails that you subscribe to via a newsletter or mail list. These are personal communications sent from each employees email client (think Outlook or Gmail). And what do each of these emails include?An email signature.
The email signature is a terrific opportunity for marketers or sales managers to automatically insert promotions, content, or important calls-to-action directly within the email signatures of various departments within the company – think: sales reps, account managers, and recruiters. These teams are busy! Nobody needs another distraction from the marketing team asking them to drop what they’re doing to promote the next event or amazing piece of content. It’s not that the sales rep doesn’t want to – they see the value, but these requests are a distraction and often get lost.
By using the email signature marketing opportunity to a marketer’s advantage, it’s easy to switch in and out campaigns with a few clicks of the mouse to ensure the content is always fresh and up-to-date.
Not sure where to start? Try these 3 examples for starters:
Drive attendance to your next conference
Promote your newest ebook or resource
Create awareness of PR or news
Want to try for yourself or your organization? Sign up for your free trial today at https://app.sigstr.com/users/sign_up.
